Written into the Body: Introducing the Performance Video Art of Tanya Ury

Summary

This essay discusses the performance art of Tanya Ury, a British artist born to Jewish-German immigrants in the UK, who moved to Cologne, Germany in the early nineties. In her artistic analysis of the aftermath of the Shoah, Ury develops a Jewish language of remembrance by turning her body into a projection surface, reflecting and criticizing the audience’s voyeurism.

Ich bin keine Performancekünstlerin, Performance ist etwas, das ich auch mache.

[I am not a performance artist; performance is what I also do.]

— Tanya Ury

THIS ESSAY INTRODUCES the performance art of Tanya Ury, a British artist born to German Jewish immigrants in the UK, who moved to Cologne, Germany in the early nineties. During the search for her family’s roots, Ury developed an artistic analysis of the Shoah’s aftermath and began to promote a distinctively Jewish language of remembrance. I will present examples of Ury’s work and discuss how the historical situation in Germany made the work of Jewish artists more difficult, slowed their progress, and forced artists into a discourse about Germanness and Jewishness, differences in perspective, remembrance, and about aftermaths of the annihilation of the European Jews. In confrontation with these developments, Ury generated her work by drawing from Jewish tradition and feminist art. Ury also drew from In-Yer-Face-Theatre, a new British vocal theater of the early nineties often connected to the Artaudian Theater of Cruelty. Ury staged often shocking performances and confronted German non-Jewish audiences with the contemporary impact of historic events in the form of her unique artistic Jewish commentary.

The history of contemporary Jewish performative expressions leads back to the discovery of an inherited trauma of the annihilation of the European Jews on the part of the descendants of survivors. Although manifested in the US as early as 1979 in Helen Epstein’s American edition of the collection of interviews, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, the acknowledgement of its legacy arrived late in Germany. It was only in the mid-1980s that Micha Brumlik published his Jewish Life in Germany since 1945, which was to be the beginning of a larger reflection undertaken by the children of survivors in Germany, one that advanced and developed its full voice in art and academia as late as the mid-1990s.